OpenAI CFO reportedly at odds with Sam Altman over missed revenue target—even as AI capex is set to hit $660 billion

ONE BIG THING

OpenAI CFO is reportedly at odds with Sam Altman over missed revenue target

OpenAI's CFO Sarah Friar is worried that the company is spending too much money on data centers and may not be generating enough revenue to support the contracts it has entered into, according to a bombshell report from the Wall Street Journal. She wants more discipline over spending, which has caused disagreement with CEO Sam Altman, the paper’s sources said. Friar and Altman called the report “ridiculous” in a joint statement.

• These are poor optics for OpenAI today, which is ramping up toward an IPO later this year. But expect this mess to be tidied up nicely for the S-1.

ELSEWHERE IN AI …

Inside Meta’s Manus fiasco: “Killing the chicken to scare the monkeys”  

China’s decision to block Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Chinese AI startup Manus raises a number of unanswered questions, Fortune’s Nicholas Gordon tells me:

• The “Singapore-washing” strategy is well and truly dead. If you're a Chinese founder and you reestablish as a Singaporean company, both the U.S. and China will continue to see you as Chinese, and thus subject to both Washington and Beijing's regulatory scrutiny.
• What the heck is Meta supposed to do now? Meta already scooped up Manus’s talent and tech; it's going to be pretty hard to give that back. Manus investors have already gotten their money from the deal; do they have to pay Meta back? 
• To use a horribly overused Chinese idiom, this may be an example of “killing the chicken to scare the monkeys." Given the pretty blatant way that Manus redomiciled in Singapore, Beijing probably had to act to stop other Chinese founders from doing the same thing.
• If Beijing starts looking more closely at tech transfer, it may not want companies like BYD and CATL to set up factories in the U.S.—what if that strategic tech leaks out to the U.S. economy? China actually has IP and technology worth protecting now.

Nvidia poached Intel's Chief Accounting Officer

Scott Gawel, 55, corporate VP/Chief Accounting Officer for Intel resigned his role on April 24 "to pursue another career opportunity," according to an SEC disclosure spotted by Fortune’s Amanda Gerut. On the same day, Nvidia's VP/Chief Accounting Officer Donald Robertson notified his company of his decision to retire. Two days later, Nvidia appointed Gawel as VP/Chief Accounting Officer with a base salary of $800,000 and equity grants with a combined value of $12.9 million.

• ‘The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees’: Nvidia executive says right now AI is more expensive than paying human workers - Sasha Rogelberg
• Musk vs. Altman: Burning Man, a ‘diary,’ and a trial almost no one thinks Musk can win - Eva Roytburg

IRAN

Talks are still on, barely

President Trump is not satisfied with Iran’s position in talks to end the war and he will respond soon. Tehran has proposed reopening the Strait of Hormuz but doesn’t want to give up its nuclear weapons program. Stopping the nukes is Trump’s red line. Trump intends to respond to the Iranians “soon,” per Bloomberg.

Iran’s leaders are in disarray, the Financial Times writes in a must-read article on the internal divisions within the regime. One faction sees the mere existence of negotiations as “pure damage” and thinks they should not be happening.

New Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei has endorsed the talks but his relative silence and non-visibility have created space for Iran’s various internal factions to disagree over the way forward.

• US being ‘humiliated’ by Iran, says German Chancellor Friedrich Merz - FT

Making a run for it?

One tanker has escaped the Strait of Hormuz and a bunch of others are clustering around the exit point, Bloomberg reports. The Mubaraz—sailing under a Liberian flag with cargo from Abu Dhabi—switched off its tracking responder while in the Strait about a month ago and reappeared off the southern tip of India. Other Iranian ships are massing just beyond the U.S. blockade line.

The war is grounding U.S. travelers

U.S. air travel has “slowed substantially” below levels in 2024 and 2025, according to Bank of America analyst Aditya Bhave. Air travel usually falls off a bit at the time of year but “we think the slowdown is likely due to the impact of the Iran war on not only airfares but also confidence.”

Winners and losers in the impending jet fuel crisis

The U.K. and Australia import the most jet fuel. The U.S. and the Netherlands are net exporters, per data from Apollo Global Management’s Torsten Sløk.

MORE FROM FORTUNE

You should pick your credit card perks like Warren Buffett picks his stocks, TD Bank exec says - Catherina Gioino

Former president of Costa Rica on de-risking fertilizer shocks: how $700 billion in subsidies can do more - Carlos Alvarado Quesada

Bitcoin drives back toward $80K—but one billionaire may be fueling much of the rally - Jack Kubinec

Reed Hastings says AI will drive a return to humanities: ‘I’d be doubling down on emotional skills’ - Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says AI won’t kill entry-level jobs. He’s hiring 1,000 new grads to prove it - Jake Angelo

Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus tells Gen Z an early mistake taught him an important lesson: ‘The care you put into your work really matters’ - Emma Burleigh

CHART OF THE DAY

Four companies will plow $660 billion into AI infrastructure this year

Corporate spending on AI data centers by the four big cloud service providers (CSPs), could hit as much as $660 billion this year, according to new research by J.P. Morgan. That would represent growth of 66% in capital expenditures for the year—an additional $200 billion—over 2025, Samik Chatterjee and his colleagues estimate.

It won’t slow down in 2027, either, he told clients: “For 2027, we forecast cloud data center capex to increase 40%+ y/y from the top 4 U.S. CSPs; even though the percentage rate might suggest a slowdown, the absolute increase in capex dollars is expected to track over $210 billion in 2027, representing yet another record by surpassing the robust $200 billion+ growth that we are forecasting for 2026.”

Upper estimate of AI data center capex spending in 2026, per JPM:

• Google: up to $185 billion.
• Meta: up to $135 billion.
• Amazon: $200 billion.
• Microsoft: $140 billion.

NUMBER OF THE DAY

26

The number of years it took for Intel’s stock to finally overtake the all-time high it hit in the 2000 dot-com bubble. It closed at $82.54 at the end of last week. It was still down over 70% from its peak last year. But this year it is up 123.69% year-to-date.

THE FRONT PAGES TODAY

Elon Musk sits out Thomas Massie's primary - Axios

Novartis CEO warns reality of Trump’s drug pricing policy will set in over ‘the next 18 months’ - CNBC

Coffee, fuel and houses: why Donald Trump has an inflation problem - FT

Goldman Sachs fired 26-year-old exec who got up early to make baking videos on TikTok - eFinancialCareers

The Nicest ‘Jeopardy!’ Champ Dissects His Losing Game - WSJ

Sergey Brin Moves to the Right, With a ‘MAGA Girlfriend’ by His Side - NYT

ONE MORE THING

The ability to move house is now a “luxury good”

Moving—as in, the act of moving house—declined more over the last few years for poorer households than it did for the rich, according to Bank of America’s data. “When it comes to moving in the U.S., income matters. Lower- and middle-income households are pulling back sharply, while higher earners remain far more mobile. And the gap is widening—suggesting that affordability pressures are turning mobility itself into a bit of a luxury good,” BofA’s Liz Everett Krisberg and David Michael Tinsley said in a recent note.